The Oz people were with him when his mother undid his bow tie and changed him into his ordinary clothes. They were with him when they ate Sunday lunch, roast goose with roast potatoes. "How did you like the movie?" his father asked Jonathan, having descended from the attic. Jonathan murmured something through a mouthful of food.

"I think he's forgotten it already," said his mother.

In the afternoon, he and his friends went out and played in the mud. Jonathan sank himself as deep as he could into it. It filled the tops of his galoshes. Together with the people from Oz, he made mud pies. They made patties of the wet cold soil. Jonathan had a bottle of poison from the bathroom. It was a bright red bottle of iodine with a skull and crossbones on it. It was a magic spell. Together, he and the Oz people put poison in the mud pies.

"We're going to feed them to the Wicked Witch," whispered Jonathan. He crept through the back door. He kicked off his boots, heavy with mud, and peeled off his smeared and sodden trousers and ran into the kitchen, trailing mud from his hands and socks. He put the mud pies on plates. He thought that mud was like melted chocolate and would go crisp and solid in the refrigerator.

His mother arrived to find her best china coated in mud and Jonathan in wet socks and underpants, shivering and leaning into the refrigerator.

"I'm poisoning the Witch," explained Jonathan. His round face was evil and eldritch. "Those are Poison Pies, so don't eat them!"

"I promise not to eat Poison Mud Pies," said his mother, endeavoring to find it amusing. "Where are your trousers?"

"Um," said Jonathan.

She went to find them. "Oh, Jonathan!" he heard her cry from the back door. She came into the kitchen holding out the trousers, a twist of cloth and mud. "How did you do this?" she demanded. There were wet footprints across her green rug, her polished floor.

Jonathan spent the rest of the afternoon indoors. He rubbed red poison iodine all over his face and lay on the green carpet, closing one eye. The fibers of the carpet looked huge, like trees, and he and the people from Oz walked through them, on their way to see the Wizard.

"Jonathan, wash your face, now," said his mother. He left red face-stains on the lime-green rug. "What are we going to do with you?" his mother asked.

He and the people from Oz hid in the shoebox. It was a great wooden box that filled one end of the corridor just outside the bathroom. He and the people from Oz lifted the lid and crawled inside it and nestled down amid the smells of rubber and leather and socks, the shoes and boots alternately hard and soft underneath them.

"We're going to disappear," Jonathan told the people from Oz. He burrowed down into the boots, piling shoes on top of himself. Later, when his parents began to try to find him, they even opened the lid and looked in and didn't see him.

Jonathan was as invisible as the people from Oz.

All that winter, Jonathan withdrew from the world to be with his friends. They wandered to the woods far down the Second Line West. They walked quickly and quietly, hoping no one would see them, past Billy Tait's house, past Jaqui Foster's house, all the way beyond the house of his parents' friends, the Harrisons. Jonathan looked down at his feet as he walked, as if ashamed, as if frightened of falling. When he thought there was no chance of anyone seeing him, he broke into a run.

Under a gray November sky Jonathan plunged into the forest through the tangle of shrubs and twigs. Inside, the woods were even darker and grayer. The ground was covered with brown leaves amid the smooth trunks of ash and sycamore. There were birch trees with their magical, white-paper bark that the Indians turned into canoes.

They were in Oz. They all sang and danced together, kicking up leaves. They danced along the banks of a tiny branch of the Credit River. Tree roots overhung the bank. Underneath them were secret houses, full of Munchkins. They would come out to join the Oz people, singing "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead." The singing went on amid showers of fallen leaves.

Then, one morning, Jonathan got up and saw that the world had turned white and that the air was full of falling flakes. The last time it had snowed had been nearly a quarter of his lifetime ago. He greeted winter like a friend he had not seen in decades. He ran out in ordinary shoes and flung handfuls of snow into the air. The sky was white.

He loved winter. In the dark, as he lay in bed in the mornings, there would be the comforting sound of the snowplows, rumbling past. His father would have to dig snow out of the driveway before he could leave for work. There would be sliding on the ice and toboggan rides. The inside of the living room windows was coated in great leafy patterns of frost. Jonathan and the Oz people sat at the breakfast table, wandering among them, in a forest of frost. As soon as breakfast was over, he would run outside.

Jonathan loved sunlight on snow, and he loved the mystery of ice. One day he and the people from Oz walked on the frozen surface of the ditches, imagining water babies shivering underneath the ice. The surface cracked and Jonathan fell in, soaking himself in ice water to the knees. He kept on walking, enchanted by the world he and his Oz friends walked through.

There were high billowing clouds. Cold made them seem solid, like icebergs in the air. Television had once told Jonathan that there were things in the air called Mushroom Clouds. People saw them and died.

Jonathan pretended that Corndale was under threat from advancing Mushroom Clouds. Jonathan was the only person who had a coat made of Jet-Age Plastic. He was protected, no harm could come to him. He walked to the gate of each house, walking on the crisp surface of the snow on his numb and frozen feet, pretending to warn them about Mushroom Clouds. He forgot about the cold.

There were canyons of ice overhead. White light swung around him like a sword. The people from Oz said that each sparkle of light on the snow was a fairy. The snow plains of Canada glittered with them, were spangled with laughing souls. If all the snow had taken to the air at once, with cries of joy, Jonathan would not have been surprised. He stood and looked at the snow, his trousers drenched, his feet and the water in his eyes ringing with cold.

When he got home, his feet were frostbitten. He howled as his toes were lowered into a basin of lukewarm water. There were sad, sick patches of gray on his skin. His mother wept. "Jonathan. Why didn't you come inside?"

She had to go to the store for ointment. Jonathan listened to the car murmuring out of the front drive.

Then he went to the new extension and took out a stepladder.

"Sssh!" he told the people from Oz. "This is the best." He climbed up the ladder and pulled himself into the attic.

It was cold inside the attic, with a single bare light and the smell of raw wood. The underside of the roof was coated in thick sandwiches of paper stuffed like mattresses. Some of it was wound up in rolls. Jonathan sat on them. There were wooden joists, and between them the back side of the plasterboards, still with writing on them.